BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 3 of 208

About BDEhrman

Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has served as the director of graduate studies and chair of the Department of Religious Studies.

Health, Wealth, and the Prosperity Gospel

In the 1960s my grandmother was a big believer in faith-healer (and later prosperity-preacher) Oral Roberts. Like many millions of others, she watched him on television and listened to him on radio, fully convinced he had the power of God to heal the sick. My father was dubious and found her faith a bit frustrating. He asked her, “Mom, if you think he can heal you, why don’t you go get healed?” She had very serious rheumatoid arthritis and was confined to a chair for the last seven years of her life. I never heard her respond. But even as a boy I thought my dad had a reasonable point. Roberts claimed even to be able to heal people long distance – just touch the TV screen or put your hand over your hearts while I pray for you. Newspapers claimed instances of incredible success. She could have been healed in the privacy of her own living room. As with many other Pentecostal faith healers in the early and mid-20th century, Roberts eventually shifted his [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-13T17:10:09-04:00September 19th, 2026|Reflections and Ruminations|

How to Justify a Lie

Yesterday I began to discuss the one Christian forger who got caught red handed who then tried to get off the hook. Well, bend over backwards to make himself look innocent. We've been seeing a lot of that these days. It goes way back. Humans are humans. Here is my assessment of the situation, highlighting my obscure little academic point: in the ancient world, readers simply did not like or approve of this kind of behavior, lying about who you as an author really were (they called these kinds of books, by the way "Pseudoi" -- Greek for "Lies"). On the contrary, they routinely condemned it. That should be borne in mind when thinking of other instances of the phenomenon, such as those found in far more familiar books from the early Christian tradition. (And this is the point the riles a number of my scholar friends, who just can't *believe* ancient authors would do something deceitful -- especially if their books were later included in the New Testament!). At the end of the previous [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-11T15:59:50-04:00September 17th, 2026|Forgery in Antiquity|

Caught Red-Handed! An Unrepentant Christian Forger

I have long argued that contrary to what you may hear a lot of people say (especially New Testament scholars!), the act of writing a book in someone else's name (e.g., claiming to be Paul, or Peter, or John, knowing full well you weren't [!]) was NOT regarded as an acceptable practice in the ancient world but was classified as a kind of lying. Scholars who think otherwise argue that the authors were not doing anything duplicitous. There are different ways scholars have made this argument, but the basic line is pretty much the same, that everyone knew that pseudepigraphy was a practice, and since they knew it was a practice, they could see through it and and either weren't deceived or weren't bothered if they found out they were deceived. I continue to think this view is absolutely and precisely wrong. In my books on forgery I point out that whenever ancient readers *talk* about the phenomenon, actually saying anything about it, they condemn it. I'm not saying that the people who did it [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-11T07:54:19-04:00September 16th, 2026|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

Pins, Gates, and Why Jesus Was Not a Capitalist
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Pins, Gates, and Why Jesus Was Not a Capitalist

Historical Jesus

Pins, Gates, and Why Jesus Was Not a Capitalist

Let’s suppose Jesus was indeed a carpenter. Where did he get his wood? I’m assuming he didn’t pick it up at Lowe’s or Home Depot…. Pondering that question has helped me think in more granular detail about why it makes no sense to talk about Jesus in relation to modern economics. It’s easy, of course (and completely right), to say in principle that Jesus could not be a capitalist because there was no such thing as capitalism then (or socialism, or marxism, or pick your ism). But it’s useful to think in a bit more detail about it. Why couldn’t Jesus be a capitalist? There certainly were people (presumably lots of them) at his time, as always, who were committed to making profits, to adjusting prices based on the market (that is, charging the most they could get), and to competing for customers without governments governing the means of production or setting prices, etc. But a capitalist economy as we know it requires advanced technology, production, and distribution, unavailable to humans in Jesus’ [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-10T09:42:23-04:00September 15th, 2026|Historical Jesus|

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary (and related topics)

In my post yesterday I made an off-the-cuff reference to the Catholic doctrine that Mary was a "perpetual virgin," and indicated I'd explain more about that and related issues in a later post. This is the post! When talking about the births of both Mary and Jesus (and related topics involving sex and conception) there are a number of terms that are often confused (especially, but not only, by those who are/have been most connected to Christianity through the Protestant tradition). Immaculate Conception. This doctrine is *not* about Jesus’ mother conceiving as a virgin; it is about Mary’s *own* mother and how she conceived Mary. Mary, in Roman Catholic thinking, did not have a sin nature. Otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus. But how could Mary not have one, if she were born and raised like every other human? The answer came in the medieval notion of the immaculate conception: Mary herself was conceived (by her mother Anna) miraculously: God did a miracle so that even though Mary was conceived through the [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-08T18:19:34-04:00September 13th, 2026|Early Christian Doctrine, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus the Carpenter?

It seems to be virtually impossible for modern people to imagine what it was like for someone to live in radically different contexts – say, Jesus, in rural Galilee 2000 years ago. It’s very difficult even for scholars who know a bit about his world. Lots of things never occur to us though. At least to me. Since I was roughly nine years old I “knew” that Jesus was a carpenter. It never occurred to me until roughly three months ago to ask what that actually may have entailed. And I’ve been reading scholarship on Jesus for over fifty years! My reflections will take two posts. This one focuses on the key passage, Mark 6:3. Mark 6 indicates that after engaging in his public ministry for a while, Jesus returns to Nazareth and teaches in the synagogue -- which does not have to mean a building; in most places like that it simply meant what the word literally signifies, “a gathering.” Technically a synagogue was when a group of adult Jewish men came [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-08T18:10:08-04:00September 12th, 2026|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

God’s Actual Name and Another Account of the Flood

Was “Yahweh” actually the personal name of the God of Israel? And how do we explain that the world-destroying flood of Genesis 6-9 (the story of Noah) comes in so many other versions from antiquity written long before the book of Genesis appeared? I have been doing a thread on interesting features of the Hebrew Bible from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press). Here I address the two issues of God’s name and the flood, both of them accounts found in the second book of the Pentateuch, Exodus. ****************************** BOX 4.1 THE PERSONAL NAME OF GOD God is called by many names in the Bible, including Lord, God, Lord God, God Almighty, God the King, and Lord God of Hosts. But there is one term used for God that appears to have been thought of by ancient Israelites as his actual, personal name. In English, this is often given as Yahweh, based on the Hebrew word YHWH. Ancient Hebrew did not have vowels, only consonants, and so [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-08T13:27:15-04:00September 10th, 2026|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Interesting Questions on the Teachings of the NT

I continue to get very good questions about all sorts of things we deal with on the blog. Here are a few that have come in recently. QUESTION: In a recent episode of your Misquoting Jesus Podcast I understood you to say that despite many errors and contradictions in the bible no doctrine is affected because it can always be found elsewhere in the text. I always believed that this was in fact not the case regarding the Trinity. If 1 John 5:7-8 does not truly belong in scripture, as I have heard claimed, I thought that there is no other place where Father, Son and Spirit are said to be One. Please can you put me right on this. RESPONSE: Ah, I wasn't referring to errors and contradictions in the Bible, but to textual changes made by scribes. No one change of any scribe has a decisive effect on any major Christian doctrine. That’s because doctrines are never based simply on one verse or another, but on an entire sweep of biblical [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-03T17:35:12-04:00September 9th, 2026|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Modern Appearances of Jesus
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Modern Appearances of Jesus

Reflections and Ruminations

Modern Appearances of Jesus

I sometimes get asked why the Blessed Virgin Mary (allegedly) appears to people all the time but not Jesus. As it turns, out, we may not hear about them as much, but there are appearances of Jesus that are recorded, some of them quite striking (here I'm not talking about in dreams but in waking life). I talk about it in my book How Jesus Became God (HarperOne) Here's what I say there, slightly edited.. ****************************** Jesus’ Appearances in the Modern World And consider the modern appearances of Jesus. Some of these are documented by Phillip H. Wiebe, in his book Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today (My footnote says this: I should stress that Wiebe is not a religious fanatic on a mission. He is chair of the Philosophy Department at Trinity Western University and is a serious scholar. Still, at the end of the day, he thinks that something “transcendent” has led to some of the modern visions of Jesus he recounts. In other words, they – or some [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-03T09:53:11-04:00September 8th, 2026|Reflections and Ruminations|

Committed Apologists and Serious Historians

Not to be the dog across the street who won’t stop barking all night, but…. Here is another post on committed Christian apologists who insist they are doing serious history. To ward off a misunderstanding: It is absolutely possible for a Bible-believing conservative evangelical to be a university-level, academically-gifted, peer-review-publishing, respected-in-the-field geologist. BUT, it is not possible for her to be a university-level, academically-gifted, peer-review-publishing geologist if her views of geology are influenced by her Bible-believing conservative evangelical faith. To wit: if she tries to publish an article in an academic journal arguing that the earth really is about 6000 years old (that’s what she learned in church growing up and it’s always seemed right), and tries to cite scientific “evidence” for it, it will not be published and she will jeopardize her career. That’s not because of prejudice or bias, but because every serious scientist in the world knows that it is not true, it cannot be true, and that if anyone thinks it is true it is not because of the [...]

BDEhrman2026-09-08T18:34:14-04:00September 6th, 2026|Canonical Gospels|

Two Intrigues About Noah’s Flood

The Flood of Noah is one of the most familiar stories of the Bible. But even those who know it well often don’t think about how it actually envisions the world (or rather, universe) or know about comparable stories from other (even more ancient) Near Eastern cultures (though some will know about the Epic of Gilgamesh). If you are among that crowd, here is the post for you! These are two more side-boxes from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press), slightly edited here. ******************************* BOX 3.4 THE THREE-STORIED UNIVERSE The mythical thought world of ancient writers—including the writers of the Bible—was entirely different from the one we inhabit today. Nowhere does that become more clear and obvious than in considering their “cosmology”—their understanding of the world we live in. Modern cosmologists tell us that our little planet is part of a solar system circling a rather average star in a galaxy with something like 200 billion stars; that there are some 100 billion other [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-28T14:27:57-04:00September 5th, 2026|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Angels Seducing Women and the Rite of Circumcision: Two Peculiarities of Genesis

Was Noah’s flood meant to destroy the giants born to women seduced by angelic beings? And what exactly was the point of circumcision? I continue here my discussion of Hebrew Bible points of interest by sharing two more of the side-boxes found in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press). These are both taken from my chapter on the book of Genesis. ***************************** BOX 3.1 SONS OF GOD AND THE DAUGHTERS OF MEN One of the most mysterious stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the Flood narrative (chapter 6) where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them, leading to the Nephilim. The word “nephilim” means “fallen ones.” According to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim were giants. Apparently, for the story in Genesis 6, there were angelic beings (the “sons of God”) who lusted after human women, and their offspring were giants. [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-27T09:31:00-04:00September 3rd, 2026|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

How Old Was Jesus When He Was Baptized? And When He Died?

I have been talking about Jesus' life before he was baptized, the so-called "Lost Years." But how many years was that? How old was he when he met up with John the Baptist? And beyond that, how long did his ministry last? How old was he when he died? The standard line is that Jesus started his ministry when he was thirty and was executed three years later when he was thirty-three. But none of the Gospels says all that. So why is it the common view? It'll take a bit to explain how it's calculated (and a bit more to explain why it's highly uncertain). Only one of the Gospels says about how old he was when Jesus began his ministry. Luke says that he was “about thirty” years old when he John baptized him (Luke 3:23). This number is not confirmed by any other source and we really don’t know if Luke had special information about this or if he was just guessing. The other three canonical Gospels say nothing explicit at [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-26T17:18:27-04:00September 2nd, 2026|Historical Jesus|

My Interview with James Carville
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My Interview with James Carville

Public Forum

My Interview with James Carville

About a week ago, out of the blue, I was contacted by the producer of James Carville's podcast/youtube channel to do an interview. Most of you know him well -- he's one of the top political strategists of our time and an incredibly personable, affable, and funny guy. Unlike me on the blog, he is all ABOUT taking political sides. And I had no idea why he wanted to interview me or what we were going to talk about. Even his producer (when I asked him) didn't really know! OK then. So I went on, and had the time of my life. It's was a terrifically fun interview, and no politics! Just a lot of key questions about everything from Jesus and the Gospels to the Council of Nicea and fun conversation. They've allowed us to put it on the blog, so here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGmLqJfnw6E

BDEhrman2026-09-01T09:12:25-04:00September 1st, 2026|Public Forum|

More on Jesus’ Upbringing

I continue here with events from Jesus’ life before he started his public ministry that I think we can treat as historical. (If you need some background on how I’m claiming this information is historical, see the previous post). His Parents In all our sources Jesus’ parents are assumed to be Jewish. They, as we’ve seen, came from Nazareth, a small rural village in Galilee, the northern part of what we today think of as Israel. They are consistently named Joseph and Mary in our sources (for example, independently, Matt. 1:16-18; Mark 6:3; Luke 2:5, 16; 3:23; John 1:45; even rabbinic sources call his mother “Miriam”). In none of our traditions are there stories about Joseph after Jesus begins his public ministry. It is usually assumed that he had died by then. The idea that he was already an old man when he became betrothed to Mary is not found until the second century, when it is sometimes used to explain why they never had sex. But it has absolutely no basis [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-26T17:16:11-04:00August 30th, 2026|Historical Jesus|

The Early Life of Jesus

I’ve been thinking a lot about the social/cultural/economic/historical context of Jesus lately, and reading a good bit on what we know about Galilee from the time. I’ll be saying more about all that anon, but I thought this might be a good chance to cover some of the basics on the blog – what do we know about Jesus from the time he was born to the time he was baptized as an adult, which is how he begins his ministry in the Gospels. For stories of his life before that, of course, all we have are Matthew and Luke. I won’t explain here why I don’t think their accounts of his genealogy and birth can be historical. I’ve posted on that a good deal before and you can find them on the blog by doing a word search for “virgin,” “Bethlehem,” “census,” and so on. But both Gospels also have short stories about him as a boy. Matthew describes the circumstances of his “descent to Egypt” with his family to escape the [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-26T17:15:58-04:00August 29th, 2026|Historical Jesus|

My Odd Situation, Writing this Book…

For the first time in my life, I’m not really sure what I'm going to be arguing in the book I’m working on.. As I’ve said before, some months ago my publisher suggested I change course for the next book. Instead of what I had been focusing on for some months (a book on the canon – how we got the 27 books of the NT – a book that I’ll do soon as well, but not first), she said they would love to have a book about: Jesus the Socialist. As always, with virtually every suggestion I get about virtually everything (academically related or otherwise), I was dubious, not sure I really wanted to do that. But then I thought about it for a while, and realized it could be really interesting. I had dealt with Jesus’ view of wealth in my last book Love thy Stranger, but this would be a different sort of thing, more along the lines of how Jesus’ views might relate to our modern economies. On one level that [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-26T16:18:16-04:00August 27th, 2026|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How the World Was Created in 4004 BCE

Now that I've started talking about the Hebrew Bible on the blog, I think maybe I'll keep talking about it for a bit. Let's start at the beginning. As in "In the Beginning..." Lots of people know that (some) fundamentalist Christians insist the beginning was when the world was created "6000 years ago." But most of those people don't know where the idea came from. (It's not stated, of course, in the Bible itself. If you find dates in the margins of your Bible, it's because modern English editors have put them there.) The "6000" years is only approximately the fundamentalist view. Well before there was fundamentalism (you can trace it to the 19th century) a standard belief among Christians (from the 17th century), before the rise of yet more modern geological science, was that the world was created in 4004 BCE. So if we think of fundamentalists as literalists, let's be literal: it was created 6030 years ago. But whence did it come? I talk about it briefly in one of my textbook [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-17T16:28:39-04:00August 26th, 2026|Public Forum|

Hebrew Bible/English Old Testament: Charting Their Differences

Some blog readers have requested more posts on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. I'm happy to comply! We begin with the foundational issue of which books are in each, in which order, and why are they so very different but also in some senses just the same. In my textbook The Bible: A Literary and Historical Introduction (Oxford University Press; a new edition of which will appear in about a year, co-authored this time with Hebrew Bible scholar Joel Baden) I explain it all and lay it out in charts. Here it is, in compact form: The Bible in Hebrew and in English have the same books, but they are numbered differently (e.g., the twelve minor prophets in the English Bible are counted as just one book in Hebrew). They are also organized differently. Different Christian denominations have different books included in their “Old Testament,” as Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches include books that Protestants consider to be the “Apocrypha.” These books are excluded not only from the Protestant Bible but from the Hebrew [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-17T16:16:18-04:00August 25th, 2026|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

The Moral Benefits of Capitalism

In my previous post I began to argue that an economic system is not inherently good or evil. Like other things (wine, automobiles, guns, computer games), systems can be used in ways the produce very good consequences and truly awful ones. It’s a point I want to emphasize because most people I know outside of academic circles think that Marxism and even socialism are inherently evil, and most people I know within academic circles think that capitalism is. (Damn intellectuals…) Here I’m focusing on capitalism since, well, like it or not, it’s the system we and virtually everyone else in the world has. So, to reiterate, the problem with capitalism is that there are capitalists and there are capitalists, and the system itself – even though it is based on a principle of self-interest -- is not necessarily the problem. It’s the people who are the problem. And an argument can indeed be made that capitalism is good for people of faith (not just Christian, of course, but I’m focusing on the Christian [...]

BDEhrman2026-08-17T16:02:17-04:00August 23rd, 2026|Reflections and Ruminations|

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